It’s not that he’s drunk I said. He’s resting. Coreen the bartender said, you got to get him out of here. I said, you served him. Coreen said, don’t start with me. I served him two drinks. I know he’s high on something or you both arrived here trashed. I tried to see not more than one of her. Maybe he has a heart condition, you know. Coreen said, he’s thirty. I said, not that kind of heart condition, you know the broken kind. Al wake up man. Al kept his head on his hands on the bar counter. He looked perfectly balanced, a tripod of head, elbows bent and then his body leaning forward on the stool. Hell, he looked angelic. I said, look at him Coreen. This is the first time I’ve seen him happy in weeks. He looks like a baby there. He looks, well Coreen, he looks serene. Coreen tilted her head sideways and blinked a brief smile. He does doesn’t he, she said. Then turned to me, ok but if it gets busy you have to go. I can’t have him doing this. I have to keep a tight house. I got you. Al was snoring lightly. He and his old lady had broken up weeks before. We’d been on a bender since then. Or should I say he was on a bender and I was following along on my days off. Honey I’d say to my wife, honey I have to help a friend out. She gave me that look, that I owe you look, that look that could mean she’s going to cut my neck when I’m sleeping or could mean I’ll be fine. That look that said let’s face it you don’t really do much around here anyways. But out of her mouth came the words that didn’t match the look. Don’t get wasted and drive. Call me if you need me. Tell Al I hope he feels better. But—and she’d pause. You know he brought this on himself. I said, honey you know he doesn’t know better. He’s a dumb ass. But he’s my dumb ass. She said, but you aren’t a dumb ass. Don’t become one. I said, he’ll get through this. She said, I know he always does. Hand me that jar of sauce.  

 

It was closing time and Al woke up. He turned to me and said, another round?  I said no buddy let’s get going. Coreen was closing up. By the Bay was the perfect bar to end up, only a few blocks from our flats. A neighborhood bar. On Saturdays it got a bit rough with young folks but during the week was just a bar. The place to come and drink. Maybe the loudest thing might be the TV, or two guys talking smack over a pool game. The lights were dim. The lights over the pool table green and gold. The kind of bar that still has the Marlboro man on a yellow poster outside the bathroom. The kind of bar where the bathroom looked run down but you didn’t piss on the floor. Coreen’s bar, who got it from her father years ago, an Irish man named Hank dead long before I lived here along the bay. Al come on man, we got to get you home. Let me take a piss. I stood in the bathroom a long time staring at this spot on the wall that looked like a map of Michigan.  Like it was a tiny mitten.  It was then I knew I drank too much. I washed my hands, dried them on my jeans. But when I got back Al was gone. I said Coreen where did he go?  She was washing glasses, back turned, hell he was just there. He asked for a drink and I said to go home. I guess he did. I threw a five down on the counter and headed out.  

 

It was autumn, the wind stiff off the lake. I looked up and down the boulevard, cars parked on both sides of the street in front of old wooden houses, all post war, run down, yet clean. The kind of neighborhood old ethnic women still swept the steps. Leaves blew in the wind, nothing else moved. A light on in a second story flat, the blue light of a television. Houses of workers sleeping before the morning shift. Al was gone, headed home I hoped, and I headed home too. There was no story here, no body found dead by the bay. Al and his old lady were done though, he had found she had someone on the side. But my wife was right. He didn’t pay attention, didn’t give her time. He accepted all the overtime he could at the plant. He thought that was being a man. I tried to tell him. I said you got to work at this thing. You got to spend the hours. He said, we need the money. I said you don’t have kids. Let’s face it you just like working and drinking. She’s I think just someone you are with so you aren’t so pathetic. He said, who you calling pathetic whopped man. I said, I got children, Lisa. This is what work is for you dumb ass. I called him dumb ass so much it might have been his middle name. Al stared at me. We never came to blows. Long ago we gave each other permission to say anything that needed to be said. 

 

I met Al in the fifth grade. I was new here, my mother moved me with my brother from Syracuse. My mother was a machinist, rare back then. I was an odd kid looking back and angry. Angry that my father left us. Angry was Al’s middle name. He was the tough kid. He walked up to me my first day at school and said, I’m going to punch you dweeb. And I punched him first square in the face so hard he fell. That’s was the beginning. I helped him up and we were friends since. We spend seven years side by side in detention. 

 

I turned down E Second street. It was two blooks from the Bayview to our flat. Al lived in the opposite direction. I had a bad feeling. I turned back from heading home and headed down to his building. In the distance I could see the lights from the boat docks. They’d been working on a big Lake Erie freighter for weeks, replacing the iron siding, a boat the size of a city block, working into the nights I could see the sparks from the welders dangling on the sides and the men up on bucket trucks. I got to Al’s flat. He lived on the third floor of a green boarded tenement across from the Orthodox cathedral. I thought it was funny all that religion right in front of his door, but Al had never stepped in a church. Al didn’t believe in much like that. He was a simple man. He was always a simple man even when he was a boy. He believed what he could hold in his hands. 

 

I rang the bell but no one answered. It was getting cold out now. The wind blowing stiff off the bay. I thought maybe Al didn’t come home. I rang and rang. Maybe he went to her house, it was walkable, though not in his drunken state. I looked out over the gold domed Russian Cathedral, looked out towards the boats and the bay. I pictured Al stumbling over the train tracks, crossing the road to where his old lady lived, the one he pushed away, the one he didn’t notice enough. She was a woman who needed to be looked at. I thought that judgmentally for a long time, felt her need when I was around her. But then who doesn’t have that need, that want. I thought of my wife at home, my children, thought of my father and his years of working in the plant, his long shifts, and yet when he came home he couldn’t take his eyes off my mother. I felt that, carried that and yet I know it was a dream, as then he was gone, left us. When I was small. What is that then, but desire’s false face, calling to us, not to a person, a human being but to a need as if a power of its own making, not something that comes from the other’s eyes. Where are you Al?  What stumbling departure has taken you into the dark, down the streets, across the tracks. I try not to reimagine the news, a body found, pale and cold. Stabbed or beaten, run over, it is so easy to pass from this world. I know tomorrow I will call and he will wake up, home and hungover. Just as every time before, for even desire’s call calls for steady legs. I turn away from his doorway, and let him rest if he is there, passed out on the coach I hope. For this is faith. I walk on towards home, to my wife already in bed. I walk slowly under the blue lit windows of strangers, through the dark and quiet streets, the ones who when they speak they speak a message I must bear.